Chapter 107
Trollmage asleep under a tarp, now officially a local legend. Riser children leave small offerings beside him: pebbles, a mushroom, a drawing of a troll asleep.
Kompis and Rougeina face each other, both on their feet, bent, trembling, but standing for the first time. Mingus sits between them, tail sweeping the dust.
eyes going gold, looking at the thread between himself and Rougeina.
a hand on Mingus's chest. The golden pulse line flickers along the panel border. ba-dum. Eyes going grey. Subtick. The world freezes.
A thousand versions of Rougeina crossing the slab to strike a target-stone. In 999 she's too slow, too heavy, hooked by gravity. In one, she Swaps with a moth, lands softly, and strikes, perfectly.
between Kompis and Rougeina, pulling taut, glowing gold, and down it, like water down a rope, flows the one version Kompis kept.
Colour snaps back. Rougeina moves on his line, without having lived it herself: moth, Swap, soft landing, strike. The target-stone splits in two. Exactly the kept version.
astonished, looking back at him.
smiling, and then his nose pours blood, both nostrils, and his knees buckle. He's paying for two lives at once.
He passes out face-first in the dust. Mingus licks his ear. Above him, faintly, the words form: SHARED BEAT.
Smurjan sits alone, cross-legged, eyes closed, three shadows around him not touching.
Inside Smurjan's mind: an empty round room with a fire. Three figures sit around it in a ring: Smurjan, tall and white-braided; Kali, one-armed, cross-legged, scowling; and Bakasura, not as a maw but as he'd look if he were a man, huge and hunched, mostly mouth, with small sad eyes. Behind them, along the walls, faint, seventeen shadows: the consumed, and Marka, watching quietly. One place on the wall is empty, where a ferryman used to sit. One of them is a big woman with an anchor.
throwing up her hand.
who has said nothing, lifting his huge head slowly. His voice comes out slow and deep and very small.
stopping mid-sentence.
his small eyes wet.
Silence. Kali and Smurjan look at the huge hunched thing they've shared a body with for centuries, and for the first time they hear the hunger instead of fighting it.
quietly, reaching out her one hand and resting it on Bakasura's huge one.
putting his hand on top of hers.
Three heartbeats, which have always beaten out of step, fall into rhythm: ba-dum. ba-dum. ba-dum. The same beat.
opening, third eye too, all three blazing crimson.
Smurjan walks onto the training slab, where Mor Lyft waits, tiny and upright, stance perfect.
And in one heartbeat, three things happen at once:
Smurjan's open palm, the Sightline drawn from his third eye to the exact point of her stance, strikes forward.
Kali bursts from his shadow on her left, sickle-flat, sweeping her ankle.
Bakasura's maw rises on her right and bites the ground out from under her stance.
Three strikes, three directions, one beat. Over his head, faint and crimson, the words form: THE TRIPLE PULSE.
And for the first time in forty years, somebody knocks Mor Lyft off her feet.
on her back on the slab, eighty years old, staring up, and she laughs: a dry, delighted cackle.
offering her his hand. Behind him, his three shadows stand side by side, touching.
swaying. His stomach growls, a deep, enormous growl. All three of them are hungry now, together.
Late afternoon. A shadow falls over the whole crack: not dusk, something else. Riser children point upward. The fires gutter.
Above the canyon, the storm-clouds of Tyngden are sinking. Low, black, swollen, they come down, slowly, like a ceiling lowering, every cloud heavy as a mountain. From far away across the plain, from the Leaden Hall, Tyngd's voice rolls like an avalanche: